


In Failure

by JazzRaft



Series: In Weakness & In Strength [8]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 05:29:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12857754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Cor reaches his breaking point.





	In Failure

Everyone had a breaking point. Except for Cor Leonis.

Everyone was scared of dying. Except for Cor “the Immortal” Leonis.

No one knew where to turn for help, what to do with themselves in this time of crisis. Except for the Marshal, Cor Leonis.

Everyone said he was their best chance for survival. Everyone said that they were safer with the Crownsguard. Everyone said that they had a fighting chance against the daemons because of _him_ , because of _his_ people, him and the ones he’d trained himself.

Everyone was lying.

None more so than Cor.

He couldn’t keep them safe. He couldn’t keep a whole city safe, he couldn’t keep his own people safe, his own king and friend and everything that had ever given him a purpose to keep moving forward. He couldn’t even keep the King’s son safe, his friend’s dying wish that he could hear in every step he took without ever listening to it pass his bloodied lips. The boy he’d had half a hand in raising himself, gone, just like all the rest before him.

In his dreams, he was only ever a boy still. Still smiling and starstruck by just how vast the whole universe was. He dreamed of big blue eyes like a looking glass, watching himself fail him every time he ever needed his help and never asked for it. That was Cor’s own fault. He wasn’t what Noctis needed him to be when it mattered. He was barely what Regis needed when the Crown fell to him. He’d let himself fall behind the masks made for him. The Marshal. The Immortal. The edifices of his shame.

Yet still, he put those masks on when all he really wanted was to cast them out into the dark. Let the daemons clawing at the fortifications take them and shred them to pieces so he could just be Cor. He could hardly remember the last time he’d just been Cor. He couldn’t remember a time before the Marshal and the Immortal, a time before he wore the markings of the Crownsguard.

He remembered the honor, though. He remembered the reason for pursuing his sword and chasing the ranks. He remembered his love for his country, his hatred for the Empire’s conquest, gnawing over the land like a gluttonous beast, never satisfied, never leaving anything behind for the rest of them to live on.

But that remembrance had paled to a phantom in his mind. It used to be all he was. It used to be his foundation, his battle stance, keeping him upright and giving him the strength to lift his arms against any who would oppose the King.

Now, all he remembered was the bitterness where his honor used to be. All he felt was pain instead of pride in who he was and what any of them were fighting for. He didn’t remember what he was fighting for anymore.

So, he lied. He said he was the Marshal. He went out and he found whoever he could to take with him to Lestallum. He lied, as the Marshal, and told prospective hunters that their sacrifice was worth it. That they would find their King and he would guide them all back into the light.

The Immortal played at fearlessness. He set out with every expedition towards Niflheim’s borders and threw himself into every horde of daemons that came out of that forsaken city in the hopes that he could die with at least some of his honor intact. At least he could go down fighting, die for the cause of the King no matter how badly he’d failed every one he’d outlived.

He lied about his breaking point. He pretended that there was no limit to his patience, he told himself that he could wait for Noctis, that there was hope still for Noctis, the last king he would ever serve.

The truth was, he’d been walking towards his breaking point all his life. It was just slow to catch up to it.

He didn’t break when Mors passed.

He didn’t break when Regis was murdered.

He didn’t break as he watched Insomnia crash down around him, watched the black spouts of smoke welcome in the warships, didn’t break at the dirty faces and reddened eyes of shattered families clotting onto the roads to escape the wreckage.

He didn’t break after waking to mornings without a dawn. He didn’t break when the terrified children he’d passed on the roads turned into Noctis in his nightly absolutions. He didn’t break when he spent his dreams chasing the bouncing locks of his hair through tunnels of sylleblossoms that shriveled up and blackened as he ran by.

He broke when he killed a daemon.

It was just an ordinary daemon, just as unremarkable as any other. Just a simple defense mission to a little shop out in Taelpar. Just another day without light to mark the passage of time. And it just all crashed over him as he watched the grotesque creature melt into black, primordial ooze. Something about the scream, something about the color, something about just… all of it. It didn’t satisfy him. He didn’t kill enough of the things that had started it all.

People always broke over the stupidest thing. It just piled up and up and up until one, stupid, simple little thing so innocently pushed it over.

He held it together in the truck bed as they headed back to Lestallum. He gripped his sword so tight that the hilt was starting to feel as sharp as the blade. He kept pretending to be the Immortal Marshal for the sweating, wild-eyed recruits that had accompanied him.

But as soon as he was alone, as soon as he found a quiet corner room in the Leville where there were no lights to break, no provisions to destroy, just empty crates waiting for storage.

He took out his sword and smashed every one of them.

It was stupid. It was childish. It was impractical and it was dangerous. It wouldn’t do a damn thing to make any of his failures hurt him any less, but it was more than what one daemon had given him. He had all this anger still left-over in him. All this rage that he reserved for the missions out into the dwindling wastes, that he packed into little parcels behind the masks his people depended on, then unleashed in a mass of slashes and splashes of scourge until he felt empty enough not to feel any of it anymore.

He broke everything that yielded beneath his blade. He wielded it with two hands and hacked at every blunt surface he could see in the dimness. He used his sword like a kitchen knife, he dishonored everything it symbolized, every King that it had killed for, and the master that had bestowed it upon him. He wanted it to snap in half. He wanted to hit something so hard that it just crumbled in his hands. Just like everything he’d ever tried to hold onto before.

He saw Mors splinter and die in the wooden planks of the barrel in the corner. He saw Regis cleaved in half under the slice of the cardboard box by the window. He saw Noctis burst apart in the feathers of an old pillow. He kicked things, he screamed at things with all of the reckless and spoiled abandon of a child’s tantrum. He thrashed and smashed and destroyed everything that could be broken until his arms hurt and even after that. He kept fighting phantom kings until his body hurt as much as his soul. And he roared upon the last dregs of his wrath, carving up the royal sigil on one of the supply crates until he couldn’t see it anymore.

When he was done, when he had nothing left to give, when he was spent and sore from his hate, he threw the sword aside and waited for his breaths to stop heaving. They came hard and fast and as shredded as all the destruction he’d wrought around him.

It wasn’t enough. It never was.

“I, uh… think you might have missed one.”

He wasn’t even surprised that he wasn’t alone. It was yet another failure for him to bear on his shoulders. The final death he’d been waiting for. The death of the Marshal and the Immortal, the death of all his masks. He had been seen at his most raw, most mortal self, and it meant the demise of all his lies.

He was relieved.

It was Prompto who he found when he could call up enough strength to move his body around to face him. He had been sitting on a broken chair just to the inside of the door. Cor had walked right past him.

He wondered what he saw. He wondered what he looked like to him. A maniacal fool? A dog gone rabid and mad without a leash to keep him from going wild? His voice sounded bestial enough when he spoke.

“What are you doing hiding out here?”

Prompto shrugged, casting his eyes back down to the camera in his hands. The glow from the digital screen was the only light in the room.

“Needed some quiet. Can’t hear the generators in here. Can’t hear anything.”

He gave him a quick glance, quick as a camera flash to give him a picture of what he was saying. No one would have heard him break apart. It was safe down here. In the dark, of all places.

It took a long time before Cor could breathe again. He leaned on the sill of a window that had long since been boarded up, even before the darkness came. It was getting hard to remember a time before that. That the only thing people used to worry about was pests getting into their basements. Sweat closed cold against the hollow of his throat.

“I was just… looking for pictures to show Noct. He’s missing out on a lot, y’know? Gotta get a bit of everything to bring him up to speed when he gets back.”

He was just talking to fill the silence, Cor knew. Or maybe he really knew just what people needed to hear, slipping it as casually into a simple conversation as a summer breeze off the coast of Caem. _When he gets back._ Because he was coming back. He wasn’t dead, Prompto was saying. He would know, too, so intrinsically linked to Noctis beyond power alone that he was.

Noctis wasn’t like Regis, or Mors before him. Noctis wasn’t like anyone Cor had ever seen die before. And neither were his friends. They were so _sure_. They were so sad, so unlike the boys he’d met in the tombs across Leide. But they were still sure. They walked forward with more conviction than he’d ever been arrogant enough to think he had himself.

Even blind, Ignis walked straighter and taller than any man that could see.

Even scarred and without an arm to defend, Gladio the Shield still honed himself every day.

And even Prompto, whose identity was a source of fear, whose genesis was linked and resultant of everything that had cost Cor three kings, still smiled in all of the darkness. He still took pictures. He still cracked jokes. He still tried to be who he was, better even.

Cor had to follow his example. He had to be better than this. He had to be more than his failures… But he didn’t know how?

“Do you, um… want to help me go through these?”

Cor spared him a glance. Saw the invitation for more than just photographs in the look of his eyes. He’d help him if Cor did. It wasn’t easy, having hope when all of its prophets had been snuffed out in a year. Cor could see that in this brief moment of empty clarity, where he had no hate left in him to keep him blind of the rest of the world.

He had to be better. Better for Noctis, and Regis, and Prompto. And most of all for himself.

Prompto had accepted who he was, a far more confusing revelation than any self-doubt Cor ever harbored for himself. And he could still be his truest self. He crushed the mask of the MT infantry under his smile. He was kind in spite of the cruelty that had made him. Cor didn’t think he could ever do that. Not with nearly as much effortless grace as Prompto did. But he was going to have to try.

In the poignant blue planes of Prompto’s stare, there was forgiveness for every failure. Forgiveness for the both of them.

Cor picked up his sword and put it in its sheath before gesturing for Prompto to follow him out the door. Back into the light.

“Sure. Show me what you have.”


End file.
